Courses

Every semester there are some one hundred courses offered with Latin American content at UNM.

LAS qualifying courses are drawn from more than 20 different departments and schools across campus, and must contain at least 40 percent of content directly related to Latin America. To help students identify appropriate courses, each semester we compile a booklet of courses which students can consult before the registration period commences. Below are the most recent listings.

Course Spotlights

LAS courses are diverse and taught by some of the most dynamic faculty members on campus! Below are just two examples of courses, one from the Humanities and one from the Social Sciences, being offered in Fall 2017.

Experimental Art & Politics in Latin America, Post-1968

In this course, Professor Kency Cornejo explores the wave of protests and demands for social justice that unfolded in Latin America in 1968. The region witnessed student manifestations and massacres, a rise in guerilla resistance, feminist movements, and changes in religion that shaped the social climate in Latin America. Simultaneously, several artists increasingly departed from traditional art mediums and challenged definitions of art and art spaces. Such strategies included a focus on the idea, the body, the public, space, and technology— all for the purpose of socio-political critique. Consequently, such practices altered how politics, art, and activism function in Latin America. This class will focus on post-1968 experimental art, and will center around topics such as mail art in Chile; anti-dictatorship art in Brazil; visualizing torture in Uruguay; prison art in Panama; indigenous film in the Andes; Zapatista actions in Mexico; large scale installations in Argentina; and postwar performance in Central America, among others. Students will both examine these artistic strategies in their contexts and investigate the impact of the resulting images in Latin American visual culture. Through the analysis of artworks, students will further differentiate between political, resistance, activist, and disobedient art, while understanding the sociopolitical concerns prominent in Latin America today.

Policing & Planning: Race and Security in Global Cities

In the US, the Black Lives Matter movement has re-ignited a long-standing public conversation about the racialized dimensions of community dis/investment, policing, public safety, and urban development. Similar questions resonate in global cities around the world. The violent retaking of favelas from drug traffickers in Brazil, the militarization of towns on the US-Mexico border, and uprisings in Muslim-majority neighborhoods on Paris’ peripheries demonstrate the centrality of security, policing and inequality in diverse processes of urban development. In this class, Professor Jennifer Tucker frames both policing and planning as practices, processes and philosophies of who belongs in the city and what sorts of people can shape it. Both policing and planning are means of intervening into the urban environment. Furthermore, both claim to hold the wellbeing of the citizenry as their primary goal. Yet planning’s concern with inclusion, equity and justice points toward a different horizon of the possible. The course will enable students to understand race, racism and dominant understandings of security as forces shaping contemporary cities in diverse contexts. Students will also consider how urban space impacts the construction and experience of race; processes that are both material and symbolic. This critical understanding of the built environment is an important lens through which to study the uneven distribution of safety and vulnerability. Further, this course explores how the urban practices of ordinary residents reconfigure city spaces, institutions, and understandings of race itself. Key areas of inquiry include citizenship practices, policing & incarceration, borders & border walls, housing, socio-spatial segregation, urban poverty, homelessness, social movements, city planning, and urban policy. The comparative, global frame of the class will put cases from cities around the world into conversation as a means to excavate key lessons, theories, and political possibilities.